Our bodies' hormones work together to tell us when to eat and when to stop. But for many people who are obese, this system is off-balance. Now scientists have designed a hormone-like compound to suppress hunger and boost ...

A team of neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center has shown how a protein, known to accumulate in Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, activates the brain's immune response.

A new study describes how the protein renalase, first identified at Yale, protects cells from the type of severe injury that could result in a heart attack or kidney failure. The finding may lead to new treatments that protect ...

Menthol acts in combination with nicotine to desensitize the type of nicotinic receptors found in lungs and airways that are responsible for nicotine's irritation, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) researchers.

Hereditary blindness caused by a progressive degeneration of the light-sensing cells in the eye, the photoreceptors, affects millions of people worldwide. Although the light-sensing cells are lost, cells in deeper layers ...

Researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have perfected a noninvasive "chemogenetic" technique that allows them to switch off a specific behavior in mice ...

Despite the abuse potential of opioid drugs, they have long been the best option for patients suffering from severe pain. The drugs interact with receptors on brain cells to tamp down the body's pain response. But now, neuroscientists ...

Receptor (biochemistry)

In biochemistry, a receptor is a protein molecule, embedded in either the plasma membrane or cytoplasm of a cell, to which a mobile signaling (or "signal") molecule may attach. A molecule which binds to a receptor is called a "ligand," and may be a peptide (such as a neurotransmitter), a hormone, a pharmaceutical drug, or a toxin, and when such binding occurs, the receptor undergoes a conformational change which ordinarily initiates a cellular response. However, some ligands merely block receptors without inducing any response (e.g. antagonists). Ligand-induced changes in receptors result in physiological changes which constitute the biological activity of the ligands.